Hi release team, I like to get your opinion and advise on the following. Motif has been released with a free license last year, and I would like to move it from non-free (called openmotif) to Debian main. Its former free replacement lesstif2 is unsupported upstream and should be retired (in Debian), as its goal has been reached: a free motif. Openmotif (which we want to rename to motif) is currently in non-free and due to a bug in dak it needs to be removed from unstable to let it into main, which makes it less suitable to test this in experimental (as it would leave unstable without (open-)motif). Motif and lesstif2 build the same libraries, albeit with different sonames, so the libraries can coexist. The -dev packages and auxiliary packages cannot coexist as file names are shared (lesstif2 was meant as drop in (binary compatible) replacement). According to policy (2.5) no two packages may be in the section optional or higher if they conflict, and packages can not depend on a package of a lower priority. So strictly speaking motif could not take over unless we can ignore this rule of policy during the transition. We have not started talking to the maintainers of packages depending on lesstif2 (other than a message to d-devel [1]), as I wanted to have the way clear before that. Graham Inggs has tested building all the reverse dependencies [2], though. So my question basically is, what would be the most appropriate order to do things? My proposal would be (with your approval) to just get motif into unstable/main and start converting the dependencies with the help of their maintainers (the libraries can coexist). Because the -dev package name has to change all build dependencies would have to get a source-full update. I would have liked to stage everything in experimental, but due to this (quoted from ftp-master) nasty dak bug, that would leave unstable (non-free) without (open-)motif. Paul [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/12/msg00369.html [2] https://launchpad.net/~ginggs/+archive/motif
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